The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

Curious Travellers

The project explores Romantic-period accounts of journeys into Wales and Scotland with a focus on the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), whose published Tours of both countries did so much to awaken public interest in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain. Find out more

James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. Find out more

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. Find out more

People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus

The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. Find out more

Scots Syntax Atlas

The Scots Syntax Atlas presents the results of over 100,000+ acceptability judgments from over 500 speakers on over 250 morphosyntactic phenomena. The Atlas also contains a text-to-sound aligned corpus of spoken data totalling 275 hours and over 3 million words. Find out more

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné

The online catalogue includes some 550 oil paintings and over 1700 works on paper dating from ca 1850 to 1903. The evolution of each painting from sketch to final oil is described and illustrated. Find out more

Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning

The project provides a richly-illustrated Catalogue of all known architectural projects by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, including over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice, analytical and contextual essays, a timeline and glossary. Find out more

Bess of Hardwick's Letters

Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2 or 1527-1608), one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. Find out more

Week Beginning 25th March 2024

Posted on5th April 20245th April 2024Authorbaitken

This was a four-day week as Friday was the Good Friday holiday. I’ll also be on holiday for all of next week other than Friday, giving me a nice Easter break. I spent a lot of this week continuing to overhaul the Speech Star website (the version for speech therapists that hasn’t been publicly launched yet). I’d made a start with this last week but still had many updates to implement. This included incorporating the IPA and extIPA charts into the website, but ensuring that only the animation videos rather than the MRI scans were included. I had also been given a selection of new animations that needed to be incorporated into the IPA and extIPA charts on other websites such as Seeing Speech, which meant updating various databases, creating thumbnails and other such tasks.

The new website now features the IPA / extIPA charts and their animation videos, a selection of speech sound videos, such as animations showing the consonants of English and a page featuring ultrasound therapy videos, as the following screenshot shows. It’s a very different website to how it was a few weeks ago.

Also this week I was in communication with Susan Rennie regarding the old pilot Scots Thesaurus website, which launched almost ten years ago now. The domain for this website is due to expire soon and Susan is going to point the domain at a different website, with the original website being archived. This all required some communication with Susan, the University’s Hostmaster and the Research Data Management team, but I think we’re getting there now.

My final major task of this four-day week was to write an instruction manual for setting up a Speak For Yersel linguistic survey website using the tool I recently created. The 13-page, 3,500 word document provides step-by-step instructions for creating the data structures the tool requires, the setup facility, customisation and exporting data. It’s hardly the most riveting of reads, but it should be useful for anyone using the tool in future (including myself!).